Jordan Romero looks much like any other Californian teenager on a holiday of a lifetime as he poses for snaps in Tibet. But unlike every other 13-year-old in the world, Jordan is attempting to become the youngest ever person to climb Mount Everest.

"Team Jordan", led by his father, Paul, and Jordan's stepmother, Karen Lundgren, are currently driving to Everest base camp before scaling the 8,848m mountain.

Of more than 4,000 climbers to have reached the summit, those claiming records for the youngest include Ming Kipa, a 15-year-old Nepalese girl who climbed it in 2003, and Temba Tsheri, a 16-year-old who reached the top two years earlier after losing five fingers from frostbite during his first attempt.

Can a child make a responsible decision to undertake such a risky challenge? Last year a Dutch court placed Laura Dekker into state care to stop her attempt to become the youngest person to sail solo around the world.

So far, Romero has climbed five of the "seven summits" (each continent's highest peak): Kilimanjaro when he was 10, Elbrus in Russia, Aconcagua in Argentina, McKinley in Alaska and, last year, Carstensz Pyramid in Indonesia. Then there is the fact that his father is a paramedic with a speciality in high-altitude physiology. "So he'll know that his child shouldn't be there," says David Hillebrandt, medical adviser to the British Mountaineering Council, who believes that 13 is too young to be exposed to such punishing altitudes.

"Is this harmful for 13-year-olds? No one really knows," says Hugh Montgomery, Professor of Intensive Care Medicine at UCL. But Montgomery points to evidence of a "neurological deficit" caused by altitude: MRI scans showed brain volumes were smaller after climbing Everest. Anecdotally, climbers (including Montgomery, who has been above 8,000 metres) widely report amnesia, while older climbers in their 40s seem far better able to cope with altitude than youngsters.

While Romero has prepared physically by sleeping in a special tent that mimics high altitudes, Hillebrandt questions whether a 13-year-old can be mentally mature enough for such an ascent. "It is totally against the spirit of true mountaineering. This sounds like it's about mass marketing, money and it's verging on child abuse," he says. "In the old days, Everest was scaled only by people with years of experience, who could tie a knot with their eyes shut in a blizzard and had a good record of peaks they had retreated from and survived. Nowadays, people are effectively being winched up, using ropes that sherpas have put in for them. It will all be done for him [Romero]. He's a token passenger."